White Bus Black Dog

Forget the police and their pay-by-the-tow rescue, we said. Diesel leaking onto my feet, we ramped the bus up to 100 km/h and headed for Ontario. I imagined us as a couple of bandits in an old car chase movie where the misunderstood and ultimately righteous villain speeds into the sunset, seeking refuge from the law over the closest state line.

But nobody gave chase. We limped into Cornwall and pulled into a truck stop an hour or so after steering our leaking, greasy bus back onto the highway in Montreal.

Parked safely in the shadow of a truck stop diner, we attempted to re-evaluate our situation. The facts were these:

1. Our bus was still leaking diesel, and the severity of the leak seemed to be increasing with each passing hour on the road.
2. We hadn’t burst into flames yet, which made us wonder if it might be best to just keep driving into the night in order to seek out a mechanic in a familiar town first thing the next morning.
3. We were out of filtered vegetable oil, so if we wanted to run on that less combustible fuel, we’d have to spend some time filtering it – a process which is both time consuming and messy.
4. We were hungry, thirsty and tired.

We sat in the truck stop parking lot batting around ideas about how best to navigate the mess in which we’d found ourselves. Ultimately, hunger and weariness won out.

We drove into town and stole some water from the washroom of St. Lawrence College. Then we snaked our way through downtown Cornwall and out into the outskirts where the road wound along the St. Lawrence River. As the sun dipped down toward the river, we filtered some oil and cooked dinner for ourselves on a grassy patch in the shadow of a small, crane-topped barge. Then we boiled a little water and drank coffee while looking out at the slowly puttering boats and bent-backed fishing couples along the shore.

Having not seen any good places in Cornwall to boondock for the night, as the sun set we made our way back to the truck stop and bedded down.